Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

Fig. 2.6. The representation of caste in sacred texts.
Worthy,
Sacrificial
Caste Office
Royal
Representative of
Admitted Indra
Priestly Celebrants
Farming Purveyors of food
Serfs Excluded except for certain rites
This schematic representation of the castes and their
function (fig. 2.5) is extremely close to the one found in
the old texts (fig. 2.6).
These classification schemes have to be seen in light of
the role of the sacrifier. “The sacrificer [sacrifier] is
much more than a worshipper…he represents a god or
gods, more particularly Indra…The King Indra is a
double capacity: firstly, because the sacrificer [sacrifier]
is always Indra and the king is a sacrificer [sacrifier];
secondly, because Indra is the god of his caste.
Everything he does in the ritual is as representative of
Indra, and all that is done to him is done to Indra. Indra
is primarily the fighting god…The king as Indra renews
in every sacrifice the contest between the light-bringing
gods and the power of darkness” (Hocart 1950:35).
According to Hocart then, the caste system is basically a
sacrificial organisation where everything is structured
around the king and his sacrifical role. The other groups
in the society have different obligations in relation to the
sacrifices.
Ritual and sacrifice – space and architecture
Rituals teach people to believe in cultural principles by
creating experiences, and the rites produce social order
by producing conceptual order – rituals create sense by
producing contrasts in the continuum of experience
(Valeri 1985:x-xi). The role of sacrifice in death rituals
is important. Eliade emphasises the sexual and fertile
associative aspects in offerings, not only because they
represented the cyclical forces, but more importantly
because these acts repeated the mythical origin and
recreated cosmos. The commemoration of the Creation
is a re-actualisation of the cosmogonic act in the rituals
(Eliade 1987:77). The original hidden meaning is
revealed in the rituals, and the “cosmogony is the
supreme divine manifestation” (ibid:80), linking man’s
rituals in the present with the divine glory in the past.
The cosmic time serves as the model for the sacred time,
and by “participating ritually in the end of the world and
its re-creation, any…man was born anew, he began life
over again with his reserve of vital forces intact, as it
was at the moment of his birth” (ibid). Partaking in the
re-creation of cosmos gives new life – and new life and
continuity are what is emphasised in death rituals. Thus,
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there is a duality whereby the same processes and
metaphors are emphasised in funerals: the death rituals
both recreate cosmos and give the deceased new life.
This dual process involves elements of sacrifice in one
or another way.
Sacrifice is an offering whereby a human offers a gift to
a god in the form of an object or an action. If a devotee
for instance offers a coconut, then after the offering the
devotee will drink the rest as a prasad – a gift from the
god to the devotee (Svoboda 1993a:52). Henri Hubert
and Marcel Mauss defined ”sacrifice” as ”a religious act,
which through the consecration of a victim, modifies the
condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or
that of certain objects with which he is concerned”
(Hubert & Mauss 1964:13). Valerio Valeri (1985)
describes ”sacrifice” as any ritual action that includes the
consecration of an ”offering” to a deity. Every sacrifice
involves an individual or collective subject that performs
the rite, or other may perform it on behalf of a sacrifier.
The offering is usually divided into two parts after it is
consecrated to the gods. The first part goes to the deity
alone, and the second part to the sacrifier who may
distribute it to the other participants according to rank. A
sacrifice is a complex ritual action, which is a function
of the following features: 1) its end and the occasion on
which it is made, 2) the deity or deities to whom it is
addressed, 3) the content of the offering and its symbolic
value, and 4) the way the offering is treated and
apportioned in the rite. The classification of sacrifices
has to be in accordance with their end and the occasion
on which they are made. Commemorative funeral
sacrifices transforming the dead into the sphere of
ancestors and rites of passage in general are performed
for all individuals, but their complexity varies as a
function of the sacrifier’s rank (Valeri 1985: 37-38).
There are different theories about sacrifice and its
function in society. Regarding the state cult, Geertz
argues “the state cult was not a cult of the state. It was an
argument, made over and over again in the insistent
vocabulary of ritual, that worldly status has a cosmic
base, that hierarchy is the governing principle of the
universe, and that the arrangements of human life are but
approximations, more close or less, to those of the
divine” (Geertz 1980:102). The rites created divine